Sunday, October 6, 2013

Mysteries of Character

(originally
published in The Outreach Connection in
July 2005)

Three movies
and the people in them:

Cinderella
Man

Virtually
every review of Cinderella Man, even
the negative ones, cite the movie as the year’s first big Oscar contender. It’s
a neat illustration of how the popular conception of quality has become a
knee-jerk commodity. I find Jeffrey Wells’ review on his Hollywood Elsewhere
website particularly entertaining in this regard. He leads off: “Cinderella Manisn't quite
stupendous, but it's honest and earnest and has dignity and heart, and if you
don't respond to it on some deep-down human level there's probably something
you should have inside that's not there.”

It’s a
statement of towering arrogance when you think about it – affirming
capitulation to commercial calculation as a measure of personal decency. As
always, this notion is tied in to the enduring myth of America’s transcendence.
Wells goes on: “Every movie that connects with
audiences (and believe me, this one will) says something that everyone
including your grandfather recognizes as honest and true. The message of Cinderella Man, simply put, is that
there's nothing like getting heavily and repeatedly kicked in the ass (like
having to deal with hopelessness and soup kitchens and bread lines, having no
job, being unable to pay the electricity bill, seeing your kids go hungry) to
give your life a certain focus.”

Which is a convenient message indeed for an age when
increasing numbers of people are getting heavily and repeatedly kicked in the
ass, even if they don’t know it yet. Cinderella
Man is the story of James J Braddock, a boxer who achieved success in the 1920’s,
plummeted during the Depression, and then made a spectacular comeback in the
mid-30s’. Russell Crowe plays Braddock, and Ron Howard directed the film: it’s
their reunion after the Oscar-winning A
Beautiful Mind (co-written by that film’s writer Akiva Goldsman). The film
is indeed impeccable, beautifully crafted, blah blah blah. It’s also lacking
the slightest iota of individuality or invention – even by prevailing
standards, it’s monstrously conventional. Among its obvious flaws: the effect
of the Depression is only superficially conveyed, the film doesn’t engage at
all with the undercurrents of boxing, Crowe’s performance is a one-note
portrayal of simpering quasi-idiocy, and it goes on.

And yes, the film is effective – I felt myself getting
choked up on several occasions. But this only confirms how its turgid
calculations feed into familiar scenarios of identification and emotional
vulnerability without ever challenging them. The fact that Cinderella Man moves you only makes you doubt the integrity of your
own responses. The fact that I enjoyed it makes me think there’s something I
should have inside my head that’s not there.

The Holy Girl

Lucrecia Martel’s La Cienaga got good reviews a few years
ago, but I found it very dense and sultry and I must confess I had trouble
staying awake through it. Her second film The
Holy Girl is quite a bit more accessible, while at the same time weaving a
thematic web of often thrilling complexity. The film follows a teenage girl,
living in a hotel with her mother. The hotel hosts a conference of physicians,
one of whom molests the girl in a crowd one day. Her head is full of ideas from
her religious instruction classes, and she fixes on herself as an instrument
for the doctor’s redemption. But these impulses can hardly be distinguished
from her sexual awakening, and her sense of mission renders her intensely
dangerous.

The film imposes
its mood with great authority – the mustiness of the hotel (a maid constantly
spraying), creeping dilapidation, references to microbes and blood flow and the
like; and the proximity of so many doctors only seems to emphasize the
unhealthiness of it all. The film of course intertwines physical and spiritual
health until any distinction appears impossible – in the opening scene, while
the religious instructor conducts her class, the girls whisper that she’s been
seen with a man, and speculate on his tongue sliding down her throat. Virtually
all relationships in the film appear either transgressive or easily undermined,
and although it’s not exactly a comedy, there’s a wryness in much of the
plotting. The girl’s mother falls for the doctor too, so that when he comes to
her to confess, she thinks his mind is on her,
and subsumes his frail attempts to spit it out with a gushing admission that
she feels the same way. But the film’s sticky atmosphere never slips, and we
feel the pressure underlying any human interaction, however flawed. The film
reaches an end point that’s highly conditional, establishing a form of closure
for one character while verging on the edge of catastrophe for others. You get
the feeling that within Martel’s universe it may always be this way.

I wouldn’t
claim that I could summarize the film with great authority after a single
viewing, and I feel rather guilty that I’m even trying to. Martel’s film
doesn’t give us what we already know – and not just because it’s from
Argentina. We all know the idiosyncrasy and murkiness
of human motives, and we must surely know that much of our success as human
beings lies in our ability to engage with that complexity (within ourselves and
others), and yet we constantly look to simplicity, to a transparency that I’d
call childlike, except that even children are more nuanced than many of the
people we see in movies. The Holy Girl
is stylized, but not at the cost of intense engagement with its superbly
conceived people.

Brothers

Susanne Bier’s Danish film Brothers lies somewhere between the two movies discussed above. It’s
the story of a soldier who’s shot down and believed killed over Afghanistan;
his wife tries to move on, growing closer to her wastrel brother in law. The
soldier languishes in a camp, where he undergoes a terrible experience (in
perhaps one of the year’s most wrenching scenes); when he’s finally liberated,
the memory of what he’s seen and done mixes in with his suspicion of events in
his absence, and he becomes frighteningly volatile.

Bier has a naturalistic quasi-Dogme style, and her movie is
exceptionally watchable. The scenes at home in Denmark have an intimate rough
and tumble style, while the scenes in Afghanistan have a more conventional
dramatic edge. Truth be told, boiled down to its elements, much of the film is
standard melodrama, and it’s not a particular step forward from Bier’s
intriguing first film Open Hearts. On
the other hand, the movie is ultimately intriguing for what it leaves out. It
leaves the relationship between the brothers satisfyingly vague, defining them
both almost as much in relation to the wife as to themselves, although her
feelings are left consistently opaque. In the end Brothers seems like the product of a much simpler sensibility than The Holy Girl, but still, next to Cinderella Man’s anthill of human
discovery it appears mountainous.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).